Hmmmm....I would have thought CNC ready was more for the buck etc.....it still has the Acme threaded screws and the quill which makes it a not so good package as far as I think.
[You get what you pay for. For more money, you can get it with ball screws. And the Taig doesn't have a quill; the Z axis is driven directly by a screw.]
For around a grand (OZ$),....... on sale at AUSEE,COM here in Dandenong, Victoria...... the SX2LF is a much better design.....it now has the solid base mount, longer table and the head designed to slide up and down on the column for Z axis travel which does away with the horrible quill design that's only fit for manual mills.
It also comes with an R8 spindle option option........that has to be the biggest biggie in my book, as you can go straight to cutter holding with R8 collets without having to lose Z height with a chuck.
[One of these:
Ausee Machines & Tools ? That's a clunky Chinese manual mill. Crappy leadscrews on X and Y and a quill for Z (unless there's another one they're not picturing), running on a sloppy rack. Selling a tool with a Morse taper and Jacobs chuck on it as a mill seems like a dangerous thing to do; Morse tapers don't tolerate sideways pressure well (I guess that little plastic shield is supposed to help keep the chuck from killing you when it lets go), and the chuck has too much runout for milling. The Taig uses an ER-16 collet system, not a chuck (although there's a Jacobs chuck option for drilling). It's a lot easier to change than R8 as well as saving headroom.]
OK, so you would still have to pull the handles off and fit stepper mounts, but as the design probably wouldn't allow fitting ball screws and ball nuts without doing some surgery to the underside of the table and saddles etc, living with the Acme threaded screws is par for the course, but it can be done if you're very fussy.
[The screws those things come with are best thrown out, but you can replace them (and the Z rack) with decent acme screws. If you want to get into a project, there's a guy here who goes by the name "Hoss" with a lot of information about retrofitting these mills for CNC:
Hossmachine Homepage ]
It's a small mill but so is the Taig.....almost the same travels etc, as it has the longer table.
The LF in the title name stands for F for a fixed column, without the sideways tilt, and L for the longer table.
The very fact that the quill is out of the picture puts it streets ahead in my estimation, a feature I heavily subscribe to for a CNC mill.
I also seem to recall that the spindle is driven with gears......but if I'm right a belt drive conversion is available, which is definitely the way to go.
Ian.